The Beginning

For a time as a child, I lived on a street called Attawandaron, named for the Neutral Nation. There was a museum at the end of the road marking an important settlement. I remember feeling drawn to it — only in the way children are drawn to something mysterious they don't yet have the language for. That early unknowing — existing right on top of something significant, shaped by an erasure so complete you don't even know what's missing — turns out to be where everything I do now began.

My family moved a lot. Seven homes, three different places. I was born on a farm near Alliston, then on to a bluish green house near Markdale. After my parents split up — my sister and I left suddenly with my mom — we moved to London. We became a blended family there, moving house several more times. 

In the summers, I found water. Manitoulin Island with my Dad — Mnidoo Mnising, Spirit Island, home to Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. Crossing on the Chi-Cheemaun ferry into a landscape that made more room in me. And Lake Huron with my Mom and Step-Dad, out on a sailboat. The water didn't care what you were carrying — that was the relief of it. Two very different worlds, two very different families, both held by the same Great Lake. It made room for it all.

Going Far to Find Myself

At eighteen I travelled to Ecuador. Alone. No Spanish. I'd been drawn to South America without being able to explain why — I found a place in the cloud forest that answered my emails, so I went. The disorientation was total and formative. Living so far outside everything familiar, I began to understand myself differently: who I was, where I came from, what I carried.

I chose my degree — international development — so that I could go back. I stayed for five years. I studied in the Andean mountains, researched eco-tourism in the Amazon, and ran a hostel on the coast. I fell into working in international education partly because I'd experienced how hard it could be without adequate support, and partly because I kept asking: whose stories are told, whose knowledge is valued, and who really benefits?

When it was time to shift again, I did a fully funded Erasmus Mundus master's across three European universities in Amsterdam, Bilbao and Dublin — studying international migration, displacement and belonging, in the way that you study the thing that is also happening to you. Then back to Canada, to Toronto, to eight years working inside a university. Moving between cities, apartments, identities. What I told myself was curiosity. What I now understand was also running.

The Breaking

A few years ago, something stopped all the moving. The years of suppressed pain and grief caught up to me. As a mostly single mom who had recently left the city, I was isolated, alone, and increasingly unable to function. I took a leave from my university job, my first of several. In that stillness, something cracked open.

It often takes hitting rock bottom before you are able to open yourself up to what you were taught was not real, or worse, dangerous. I was willing to try anything. My logical, scientific, well-trained academic brain was hurting and confused enough to allow curiosity to lead. To follow the knowing that I had felt as a young child, that things could be different. I did not want a life of psych wards and pharmaceuticals. I had seen how both, in efforts to help, had worn away at my Father's body and spirit over many years. Sometimes fear is the thing that finally moves us.

The Unravelling and the Opening

This is one of many points in my story that will be familiar to others who have spent most of their lives masking — who start to wonder, eventually, about their own neurodivergence. All the parts of themselves that they have had to bury deep to fit in, to function. I was one of those high achievers. A perfectionist. I gave my all to everything I did, because I couldn't imagine any other way of being. If I wasn't passionate and driven about what I was doing, I couldn't do it. And so I found ways to be passionate within institutions that either took advantage of that passion, or asked me to make myself smaller.

What pulled me back was something I hadn't expected: meditation. For me, it was not about quieting my mind nor voiding all thoughts. It was about turning down the stories that were not mine, so that I could begin to listen to my own inner voice. And the ways that the spirit world was communicating with me — had always been communicating with me, even when I wasn't listening or couldn't hear. This is what saved me. This is what pulled me back from the brink. This is what they don't teach you in the school room or hospital bed.

Maybe it's not for everyone, but it worked and is working for me. It has shifted my entire life experience. It has been the only thing that truly lessened the intensity of the lows — what the doctors call depression — and the sharp constricting way that anxiety, and an underlying fear of, well everything, had shaped my life for as long as I could remember. My relationship to my own spirit, and to the spirit world all around me, started to take shape.

But of course, at the time, I was still learning, still discovering. As soon as I felt more stable, I went back to work. I pushed myself harder. I was working on a project that I was obsessively passionate about, that I had been working towards for years. And then I watched it fall apart around me, again. This time differently — not my inner world cracking, but my outer world crumbling. So I took another leave. To find my way again. Eventually finding a job somewhere else. Another university. Slightly different, but really more of the same.

Grief

Right before I started my new job, I followed what felt like a strange urge at the time, to go to an event at the Orphan Wisdom School, led by Stephen Jenkinson. Most that attended were death doulas, care workers, therapists, and other grief practitioners. I was not. We talked about grief and death and dying. It felt like an opening I never knew was closed. Never knew could lead somewhere new. The grief I had been carrying following my father's death finally rose to the surface.

He died in 2019, after years of extended hospital stays, and a life in and out of psychiatric care, struggling in ways the institutions around him were never quite built to hold. When he died, I was in the hospital room with him. I felt his spirit. I saw him, in my mind's eye, as he wanted me to remember him — not the body on the bed, but him. I have been, slowly and in different ways, developing a relationship with his spirit ever since. While also beginning to face how fully his pain had shaped mine.

More recently, in March 2026, my Step-Dad died. He came into my life before I started school and was an anchor of stability through all the years of change — a second father, the kind of person you never imagine losing. Until suddenly, we did. This loss, met as a different person than I was in 2019, has deepened my relationship with the spirit world. I can feel his presence. His laughter and joy remain with me, even when the pain is unbearable. My time at the Orphan Wisdom School, and what came next, helped prepare me to meet this loss differently.

The Training

Then, a year into my new job, I got sick — chronically, confusingly. The emotional exhaustion had turned physical. I did my best to keep going. To treat the symptoms bubbling up. And in the murk of all of it, someone I'd met at the school sent me a link to a Shamanic Practitioner training they were involved in. My gut said go. So I went — without knowing what I was walking into. Committing myself to this program deepened my relationship to the spirit world and to myself. It helped give me new layers of understanding to what I had begun experiencing on my own the year before. 

It all unfolded naturally, in ways that personally felt very profound. What I experienced during the course, but especially that in-person week, felt nothing short of a miracle to me. And I don't use that word lightly. Untapped parts of myself were all of a sudden showing up in new ways. The people around me felt it too. I started drumming for the first time. It was immediate. Natural. Like a homecoming. A return to something that part of me had always known. But that had been hidden, buried, waiting. I was like a dry, discarded sponge, soaking up everything I was being taught, exploring the practices, learning everything as quickly and diligently as I could.

Months in, Spirit helped me realize that my house was contributing to my illness. That I needed to move. This time, not something I had been planning on, but something that was necessary. In the place I had promised myself I would finally stay. Instead, suddenly and unexpectedly, I asked my partner of one year if we could make a life together — fully, immediately, three kids between us. We took the leap. But I got sicker. My body was forcing me, again, to face the fact I was not living the life I wanted to live, that I had come here to experience. I had to take another leave from work, my third in two years.

While I was still struggling with my physical health, I continued with the Shamanic Practitioner training, giving it my all, as I had only ever known how to do. One of the things we learned was psychopomp — the practice of helping a spirit transition when it remains tied to the physical world after death. Of everything we learned, this felt the most natural to me. It is, at its heart, a form of ritual — a deliberate tending of what remains when a life has ended. It has shaped my relationship to death and my approach to grief, becoming one of the threads that runs through my creative work.

The training was also where I made my first talisman from natural materials. Then came the fire ceremony — a ritual release, a letting go of the thing you'd just made, which turns out to be its own kind of lesson. Before the burning, I had a vision of what I needed to make: a physical representation of the way sound reverberates outward from a drum, the way trauma and healing ripples both forward and backward through time and lineage. I made it. Then I kept making things.

The Making

I wasn't able to finish the training. But meeting my teacher, the other students, and learning what I did in such a short time, opened something very deep within me. I started prioritizing my art, the process of creating. It was what my body and spirit needed. What the little me inside was screaming for. A way to be me. A way to allow the parts I had hidden for so long to breathe. 

I started my own business, Yellowaga Art & Design. I opened a stand at the local farmers market. I started sharing my creations with the world. Experimenting with what I could create and how. I met some of my first clients at the market and made connections with many special people. The market taught me something I hadn't expected: that this work could be joyful. That people could arrive curious, excited, even playful — and that something real could happen in that register too. Not everything needed to be heavy to be meaningful. 

This is how I began to shape my offering. The wall hangings, the talismans, the working with those inside of grief, of change, of transitions. It all unfolded when I started to allow myself to just do it. To explore. Without knowing where it would go. Without feeling ready or prepared. And without the credential or the external validation I had always believed I needed first. It turned out I didn't need either.

I started writing again too — joining an online community through someone I met at the training. In August 2025, a consistent writing practice took hold. Finally saying on the page what my body had been holding for years. But it became something larger than that — a way of letting Spirit move through language. Both the making and the writing arrived through the same door, before I understood what they were or how they would shape everything that came next.

This Land and my Ancestry 

I now live on Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg territory in the Kawartha Lakes — a people whose traditional lands span much of present day Southern and Central Ontario. The home we are making sits on a lake named after the Passenger Pigeons that once blanketed the forests and skies.

It used to be a slow-moving river. Those who I politely call the takers — my ancestors, the ones who came from Europe and displaced the Michi Saagiig — built a dam and lock system that flooded many of the waterways. Ancient wild rice beds were destroyed. The migratory routes of the salmon and eels were blocked. The land, its people, and its creatures were fundamentally changed and harmed, without consent.

I am an uninvited guest on this land — my ancestors claimed ownership over something that was never theirs to own. I hold that truth as part of the ground I stand on every day. I'm not Indigenous to this land. I do not belong to any of the more than 50 distinct First Nation, Métis and Inuit peoples across what some call Canada, on the lands many have always known as Turtle Island. I want to say that plainly — because people ask. The materials I use, the way I relate to the earth, sometimes even the way I look, leads people to assume I am.

My great grandmother on my mother's side came from Galicia in Eastern Europe — a region spanning what is now southeastern Poland and western Ukraine — where, prior to mass Christianization, people were rooted in Slavic Paganism: a polytheistic and animistic spirituality centred in deep reverence for nature and ancestor worship. My great grandfather on my mother's side and my great grandparents on my father's side all came from England — long disconnected from the animistic roots of pre-Christian Celtic, Roman and Anglo-Saxon Paganism before they ever arrived here. I am only now beginning to unravel the spiritual lineages my ancestors were forcibly separated from.

I spent years telling myself I had no right to the kind of connection I longed for. Spirit has slowly pushed me to open to the truth that all humans have indigenous roots to some place — that animism and earth-based spirituality were practiced everywhere, before they were violently disrupted. I'm not reclaiming someone else's tradition. I'm finding my way back to something human and ancient, from my own complicated settler lineage, in relationship with and in deep respect for the Anishinaabe peoples on whose territory I live.

My Life and Work 

My name on this work is Emma Yellowaga. Yelowaga/Yalowega is my maternal grandmother's maiden name (coming from my great grandfather's line, a lineage that we know little about) — with an extra L added, because I have always loved yellow, and because the name wanted to be just a little more my own.

It connects me to my mother's line, and much of what I do is for her. A woman who moved through a world that often demanded her smallness — who was asked, again and again, to fold herself down. And who, despite everything that tried to break her, kept finding her way back to joy. I watched her love fiercely and beautifully, even after so many early years when love had not been safe. I am trying to live in a way her life made possible. To let my heart lead. The way hers always deserved to.

I make custom, handmade wall hangings and talismans for people navigating grief, change, and life's significant transitions — working intuitively with materials gathered from the natural world: feather, bone, shell, stone, quill, wood, and wing. Every piece comes with a story written for you. Sometimes I am moved to create before I know who it's for — ceremonial regalia and tools made when Spirit leads, waiting on my website for the person they were made for.

You can read more about how I work and what I make on the Creations and Ways to Work With Me pages.

I live by the water now, held in her embrace, with my partner, our three kids, two dogs, two cats, and a gecko. The cedar trees that line the shore are some of my closest companions. I'm still learning how to be a human led by Spirit. I'm still learning how to be me. This place — the creatures, the cedars, the water and its little islands — is becoming the home I spent most of my life looking for.

My studio is here. A yurt by the shore — a place to create, to connect, to practice ritual and ceremony. As a little girl I always dreamed of living in a round room. It turns out this is exactly that. A circular space to hold all of me — still being filled, still taking shape, still becoming what it wants to be. In my messy, uncertain, yet honest and full way.

I want to name something that may not be obvious from everything above: I laugh a lot. I can be downright silly. This work is not always solemn — I fluctuate, and I hold the weight and the levity, the grief and the delight, sometimes in the same breath. Humour has always been part of how I navigate the hardest things. It is part of how I show up with people too. If you were expecting someone serious and ceremonial in all moments — I am sometimes that. But I am also the person who will laugh with you, probably at an unexpected moment, and mean it.

If you're carrying something that doesn't have a name yet — or moving toward something you can't quite see yet — you might be in the right place.